Sarah Jessica Parker has opened up about how playing Carrie Bradshaw was almost a deal-breaker for her.
On Monday’s episode of Kristin Davis’s Are You a Charlotte? podcast, Parker revealed that after the Sex and the City pilot was picked up by HBO, she quickly called her agent asking him to get her “out” of filming multiple episodes.
The Hocus Pocus actor told her former co-star that she had good memories of filming the pilot back in 1997, but she never thought about what would happen if it got picked up for more episodes.
“And when the show was picked up, I panicked,” she said. “I was like, ‘I can't be on a TV show. I don't think I'm suited for that life.’”
Parker explained that after appearing on multiple television shows, such as A Year in the Life and Equal Justice, she didn’t like the idea of doing the same thing for so long.
“It's very hard to explain. It also kind of depressed me,” she said. “I think that it was the idea of doing the same thing over and over and over again. And I think I'd always been lucky that I got to be in a television series, and then it was over. I met great people, had a great experience, worked with great actors, great directors, thought the stories were interesting, wanted to do the shows, and they had shorter lives, maybe one or two seasons. And then I moved on.”
She said her original goal was to be a “journeyman” actor, who balances smaller film or television roles with theater roles.
“The idea of a television series meant that I couldn't do all those things,” she said. “And it just kind of felt like somebody was, you know, putting their hand over my mouth or something. It was very weird.”
The actor added that she did end up proving herself wrong, but she still asked her agents in the moment to get her “out of” Sex and the City, and tried to negotiate by volunteering to be in multiple movies for HBO.
However, because HBO was such a new network at the time, her agents told her to do the show for one year, and then she could quit if she still didn’t like it.
But after the first day of filming, she “never looked back.”
“I was never not happy to be there,” she said. “There was no place I would rather have been than on our set every single solitary day.”
Parker played Carrie Bradshaw on Sex and the City for six seasons and won an Emmy for the role in 2004. She also appeared in the two films spun off from the initial series. Parker later reprised the character in three seasons of the show’s spin-off, And Just Like That… The third season of the show premieres on HBO Max on May 29.
